Narrative is the conscious recognition of our environment and our life experience. It begins as our inner voice conceptualizes the story of everything we see and do. Narrative is the essence of human communication. Being social animals, we spontaneously share our narrative with others around us. Narrative is responsible for the development of society. A common collective identity, culture, evolves from shared narrative. Norms for acceptable social behaviour, moral concepts, are distilled from the accumulated narrative. Structured and formalized narrative such as legends became a tool for teaching and learning culture and moral code. Imagination expands the limits of narrative and transforms fact into fiction. It allows the personification of the inanimate and metaphoric representation of the animate. Fables exploit imaginary forms to deliver moral messages. Spirituality exists somewhere between fact and fiction. Myth was created to communicate spiritual, sacred messages. Mythic narrative describes what affects the soul as well as what cannot explain in a rational manner. This website proposes to explore several dimensions of narrative. Some of the topics we will examine are the temporal evolution of narrative form prehistory to prophecy, oral history, personal discourse, moral discourse, the transformation of narrative from verbal to textual, to media and of course, storytelling. Although storytelling has developed as a contemporary fashion, we will only discuss the prevalence of spoken word artists as a phenomenon. We will explore storytelling as a pervasive occurrence from urban myth to corporate mythology! We have begun with pages on narratology, the study of narrative, in order to establish a vocabulary for the discussion of narrative. This initial posting will be followed by a discussion of the temporal context of narrative, from creation to prophecy. Please visit the following pages: What is Narratology ? Site Plan Any comments or suggestions are welcome. Please send us a message. |
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